Hey, if I’ve offended you, I do apologize for that, it truly wasn’t my goal. But I do strongly disagree (which is allowed).

And I think it’s pretty obvious that microtransactions could never, ever, possibly be more lucrative for Valve than selling games. It’s just a numbers thing. I mean, dlc can sometimes make more money than game sales for some titles, that’s a fact. But Valve has what, a dozen games that they could potentially sell dlc for? That’s a pretty hard limit. Whereas they also make money on every title sold in the store, and there are currently over 10,000 titles available from the steam store. That’s just like, a lot more than a dozen…

Um, no?

I guess this must be surprising to hear, but it’s just easier to sell content of actual value than bullshit. Yeah… some people will buy bullshit, and yeah, one can take advantage of those people, but having actual products is still a better business model.

But hey, if you’ve got these things all figured out, totally start your own game studio/global digital distribution system. Go make bank on microtransaction garbage.

I mean, they get a sizable cut from the majority of games sold on PC. I think that’s their business model.

I hear you about loot boxes and skins and stuff. It’s just, that has to be a small part of their total profit.

The picture isn’t great, but I’ll bet the framerate is amazing!

That’s a good post, and you’re right about nearly all of it. I’m with you all the way until your conclusion.

Without the experience of building and sustaining an underwater base, we die on Mars, if we can even get there in the first place.

A few things, first, there’s no doubt that we could have gotten there in the 60s we had the technology then, and we still do. But that’s obviously not the hard part.

Second, no part of a sustained base in space requires a base underwater, they’re a mostly different set of challenges. Honestly, I expect time will tell on this one (and pretty soon), the US and China are both racing to put a base on the moon, nobody to my knowledge, is planning a deep sea base.

And it’s quite understood that the moon is a stepping stone, if you can find water there, that’s the essential material needed to sustain life. But it’s also exactly what you need to produce rocket fuel. If you create a spacecraft capable of getting to the moon, refuelling there would allow you to get to anywhere else in the solar system. So while an underwater base could teach some of these lessons, I expect that In practice, a moon base will teach us how to live everywhere else in space. Because not only is that closer to the goal, it’s what we’re actively doing.

Yeah, that’s pretty great. I really want to believe that’s 100% true and not an exaggeration in any way. Tuffy for the win.

I’m going to go ahead and say those are different goals.

Also, we’ve had underwater bases, we just haven’t continued to man them, there just wasn’t the will to continue funding it. Sealab

We could conquer the oceans, we just aren’t interested enough. We could conquer space too, we just aren’t interested enough. We are humans, the ultimate badasses of this galaxy; as soon as enough of us are in favor of doing something, i.e. willing to pay for something, we can do it. No exceptions.

We’ve discovered more about outer space than our own waterways, TBF. By orders of magnitude, even.

I’m not sure that’s accurate. For instance, we see ocean whales all the time, we’ve never seen even one space whale. How can you explain that?

That’s what I’m hearing. Honestly, I think that checks out.

This is the same reason that harvesting solar energy in space and beaming it down is also a stupid fucking idea. It’s politically problematic. Nobody wants anybody to have giant death rays in space, so there’s effectively no way to get the energy down to earth. It looks like we’ll all just have to rely on all the green technologies that already work.

And with all the stories going around now of people posing as ICE agents to rob and sexually assault women how do I know these fuckers arn’t one of them?

I’m asserting right now, that those are all ICE agents. How else could they be wearing official ICE uniforms? ICE can be accused of every crime committed in the US by a person wearing a mask, until they can confirm the whereabouts of every one of their agents at all times. Or until they change their uniforms.

Ok, so their claim is that he’s a hero? Got it.

Haha, “autoclaved off the planet”. There’s an amazing expression.

Having played Minecraft and No Man’s Sky, I can say that no world is necessarily too big, because infinite is not too big.

The supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy is called Sagittarius a. It’s about 26000 light years away, so if an event like that happened it would take 26000 years for us to notice. (But who’s to say that an event like that didn’t happen 25999 years ago? Perhaps we’ll see it tomorrow.)

I honestly have no idea where it would fall on the coolness scale. Somewhere between “an astronomer noticed an abnormally bright star” and “my God… so this is how it ends…” So… somewhere between “meh” and “shit”?

Fair enough.

When given the option “spare him, or kill him”, one has to ask “is he worth XP?”

A lot of Crusader Kings or assassin’s Creed?

(I think in one of AC games you’re actually doing missions for Machiavelli himself.)

That many anvils… Maybe that’s wipe out the iron supply.

Though death valley might be an even stranger landscape, covered in the anvils left behind.

And I’d be eating readily available street pizza all the time!

“Hey look, someone left a full ham roast here on the sidewalk! I’m bleeding pretty bad, so I’ll go ahead and chow down! Let me just squat over it real quick, I can usually eat a roast ham in like 0.06 seconds (assuming I’ve lost enough blood).”

Given that AI trainers are training on YouTube videos too, that sounds like Anubis isn’t going to impose meaningful costs on them.

Well, does it work?

You don’t need to guess about it, you can simply look at traffic records and see how much it changes after installing Anubis. If it works for now, great. Like all things like this, it’s a cat and mouse game.

Also, the way your computer interprets a YouTube video and the way a scraper interprets a YouTube video may well be different. But in general, for a browser, streaming and decoding video is a relatively heavy and high bandwidth operation. Video is much higher bandwidth and has much higher CPU processing requirements than audio, which likewise is heavier and higher higher bandwidth than text. As a result, video and text barely compare, they’re totally different orders of magnitude in bandwidth and processing needs. So does an AI scraper have to do all that decoding? I actually have no idea, but there definitely could be shortcuts, ways to just avoid it. For instance, they may only care about the audio, or perhaps the transcripts are good enough for them.